I used to run CollegeACB.com, which usurped JuicyCampus.com and was one of the most popular anonymous college "gossip" sites ever. >20M monthly pageviews and sparse usage at 500+ schools, intense usage at 100+. I sold the business in 2011.
Yik Yak is heavily protected by the Communications Decency Act, and articles like this (generally) just serve to fuel the fire. After Time Magazine, Mike Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Ed, et. al. tried to draw negative attention to CollegeACB, it only served to strengthen our brand and broaden our footprint.
One needs to understand that sites / services like these aren't going anywhere. They'll continue to enjoy legal protection and benefit from the virality of anonymity and mean-spirited gossip.
One of the most effective forms of dissent I experienced while running CollegeACB were spoiler-filled-spam. If people started posting Game of Thrones spoilers and other such content, I'm sure it would affect usage. Creating petitions, contacting school officials, etc. were totally ineffective, and almost always just made the promise worse.
I'm not terribly proud of my ownership of that site, though I did try to run it with something of a conscience: never called for gossip, voluntarily removed 30,000+ posts, etc. Happy to answer any questions if people are interested about this space.
Hey, Peter. Fellow Wes'12 here. As a student at the most-active school on CollegeACB (CollegeACB was originally developed as a replacement for a LiveJournal-based board active at my school), I saw the good and the bad. It was terrible for some students, who were heaped with anonymous abuse. I was lucky enough to never face that, but I know others who did and saw the negative effects of anonymity first hand.
But there was also a lot of good. During a terrifying two days after a student was shot on campus, it was the only source of information and communication while we were locked down in our dorms. It also helped build a sense of community across cliques, even if nobody would admit to reading it.
On the whole, I'm glad the CollegeACB existed. And anonymity is not going away. With strong moderation and flagging I think the worst impulses can be tempered.
> I'm not terribly proud of my ownership of that site, though I did try to run it with something of a conscience: never called for gossip, voluntarily removed 30,000+ posts, etc.
I think these facts are commendable, and I'm glad you at least made attempts to prevent outright hostility (I'm assuming you removed particularly incendiary messages).
Ultimately it isn't the technology of sites in this space that I'm really curious about, it's more the motivations and intentions of those that create apps in this space. It's easy to paint such creators as vile and or devious individuals looking to exploit the worst of people to make a buck. In reality, I don't want it to be that simple...at least not everytime. So, I guess I'm most curious as to your motivations and expectations for CollegeACB when compared with the actual outcomes.
You mention usurping JuicyCampus, which had its fair share of negative criticism. Was your goal to replace/compete with JuicyCampus or was this an unfortunate side effect?
What drove you to sell the site? Was your intent to turn a buck or did the content and the way the site was/is used eventually turn you off on being associated with it?
Hindsight is 20/20, and you mention not being proud of owning CollegeACB. How did you feel about it at the time, when the site was enormously popular?
> So, I guess I'm most curious as to your motivations and expectations for CollegeACB when compared with the actual outcomes.
I'll address CocaKoala's (similar) question here as well. First a little backstory: I "inherited" CollegeACB from the original creators who had grown weary from the moral quandaries of running the service and lacked the time/effort to expand the business. I was a very ambitious 18 year old college Freshman (now 24, a '12 grad) and contacted the owners asking to take over the site (they kept an equity stake and I did all the work + invested my own cash). I had seen how it was used at my alma mater-- mostly for "legitimate" secrets (IE: "I have an eating disorder and just regressed. Someone who's been through this-- help!") or community-type postings (IE: "What does one wear to Psi U's 'sex party'"). For the most part, it was fairly productive and mean-spirited comments were few and far-between and were generally removed through our auto-moderation features (something like 5+ "reports" would delete it automatically). It was also wildly popular; everyone on campus knew about "The ACB" and it was seen as lighthearted procrastination tool that everyone knew not too take seriously. Vile threads were dismissed as "trolls" and people looked at the platform somewhat fondly.
I was happy to improve the technological experience, and had ideas about growing this slowly to other schools. I'll jump now to JuicyCampus below...
> You mention usurping JuicyCampus, which had its fair share of negative criticism. Was your goal to replace/compete with JuicyCampus or was this an unfortunate side effect?
JuiyCampus was always our biggest competitor. We were the upstart to their incumbent. In January 2009, a month after I took over CollegeACB, I learned that JuicyCampus was closing. Despite popular reports, it had nothing to do with the various threats of lawsuits (though there was some merit behind the anti consumer fraud suit, as they weren't deleting posts like they claimed to do in their TOS). I was able to put together a $10,000 deal within about 10 minutes of talking with Matt Ivester (JC CEO) for 2 months of their traffic. They actually gave me a 501 redirect.
It was my intention to bring the "CollegeACB model" of legitimate secrets and productive use to the "raw masses" that would use JuicyCampus merely to slander and insult their peers. Clearly, I underestimated the difficulty in changing a mindset when hundreds-of-thousands of users already have a set agenda in their minds.
We built in a robust moderation queue and I would spend several hours a day removing posts and manually replying to every removal request. Looking back, it was terribly inefficient, but still leaps better than JC (they never removed a post, to my knowledge).
So my goal was to CHANGE the behavior of JC users. I was never successful.
> What drove you to sell the site? Was your intent to turn a buck or did the content and the way the site was/is used eventually turn you off on being associated with it?
Closely connected to the above answer. I had intended to change the spirit of the site, and convert libelous gossip into productive, anonymous-facilitated honest discussion. When I deemed that to be impossible, I began contemplating selling the site.
It's worth noting that the site was very hard to monetize. Even at considerable scale from a great audience, we never made all that much money. The recent "side project" thread reveals that many people's "side projects" were earning much more than this seemingly-wildly-popular site.
Anyway, I was approached by a buyer who indicated that it was his sole intention to "clean up" the site through productive discussion encouragement. In short, he was also wildly unsuccessful, and ended up re-branding the site and then closing it completely within a matter of months.
> Hindsight is 20/20, and you mention not being proud of owning CollegeACB. How did you feel about it at the time, when the site was enormously popular?
I was initially excited by the thrill of running a popular site; being a known personality around campus; doing media appearances and generally feeling like a tech badass. But that feeling faded when I began to recognize the corrosive nature of the site. The feelings that were terribly hurt. College experiences ruined. I was legitimately shaken by the fact that numerous people pulled out of college and/or were put into dangerous psychological situations because of the things written.
I had contemplated closing the site completely and replacing it with a message to "respect your peers," but found a buyer before it came to that. It's now evidence of an "exit," and has been helpful in establishing my track record, but it's not something I usually bring up or tout unprompted.
I'm now seeking retribution, and run a "student first" service in Texts.com, a free textbook exchange and price-comparison engine.
That's really interesting; thanks for taking the time to write it all up.
Do you think that it's possible to build a site or an app that captures the good parts of CollegeACB, without devolving to the bad parts of JC? You mentioned that you had failed to convert JC, and that the guy who bought from you similarly failed, but the fact that ACB was a positive force for a time seems to indicate that on some level the model is sound. If you're starting from scratch instead of trying to change a mindset, are there things that you think would encourage positive behavior over negative?
Or is it more a case of you really have to get lucky with the community, and it's possible with small groups (up to the size of a college, maybe) but not possible with larger ones; at a certain point, the bile just outweighs the brightness?
I think that some communities simply wouldn't ever be able to use it in a productive fashion. To borrow your phrase -- I quite like it -- the bile will always outweigh the brightness. I think that this holds especially true for bigger schools with greek populations.
At smaller campuses, starting from scratch, I think that one could create positive communities. Steps I would take:
1) Stay small, keep it niche, spread through word of mouth alone
2) Start conversations around positive topics, where anonymity plays a key role in facilitating discussion ("Why do you love this school? Why do you hate this school?") etc.
3) Stamp out personal attacks as quickly as possible. Either through manual moderation, or through community-policing tools. Most likely a combination of both. Ideally hand-select proven contributors to serve as volunteer moderators. Reports of mods abusing power should be dealt with swiftly.
4) Build in filters to identify content that may be a personal attack. I believe Secret does something similar, a prompt: "is this about a person?" Honestly, one could probably built a queue of "flagged" content (manual or algorithmic) and have someone on oDesk / mechanical Turk determine whether it references a specific individual.
I think that it would be hard to grow at all quickly while staying true to these principles; and, as I've mentioned, I'm not sure there would be much room to profit. That said, if you had a productive community with those college eyeballs, you could probably use the platform as a way to promote other businesses.
Just a question out of sheer curiosity from a business perpective, how were you monetizing the site? What prompted a buyer to pay what I assume is real money for the site? Was it a 1k, 10k, 100k exit?
I monetized purely via display ads (a lot of second tier networks that would turn a blind eye to the libelous content), with fairly terrible CPM but lots of views.
I believe the purchase also monetized using paid CAPTCHAs (where the viewer has to watch a video / type a phrase), which probably did very well considering the sheer volume of posts.
I don't really know how those applications work. The only problem I have with them is if the person being talked about doesn't have the ability to respond, and for that message to be seen by everyone. If someone wants to say something anonymously, fine - that's their character - but I want to see the character of who they're gossiping about, bullying, to see what the other side of the story is.
One of the most fiendish tactics was to fake a "response" from the attacked individual. An easy way to add even more fuel to the fire, and many/most viewers wouldn't recognize the obvious trick.
Now that would be considered defamation, impersonating a person, etc.. If that can be proven anywhere then that's huge, disturbing, and disgusting. I don't imagine the chances of that coming to light are very high though because people who don't gossip/bully wouldn't be using those apps, so friends of the target wouldn't likely see if there was a response - or if they did I wonder what % of friends would actually ask about the response.
What benefit did you feel a site like that brought to the world? I'm not trying to be catty with that question, I'm honestly curious; a big part of websites nowadays is "We're trying to solve problem X in Situation Y by providing solution Z", and it's hard to see how that sentence gets filled out with JuicyCampus analogues unless it's "We're trying to solve the difficulty of being an asshole while remaining anonymous by providing a platform to do so". Was there some larger cause to CollegeABC, or was it simply "If we don't do it, somebody else will, so we might as well fill the void"?
It's interesting to note that the effective way to get people to stop using the site was to just make it unpleasant for them; that's a clever way to hit them where it hurts, I think.
In short: I originally ran the site at just a few schools, my alma mater being one of them. There, it was used productively and mean-spirited gossip was far from the norm. It helped people get honest advice, ask questions related to events around the school, etc.
When we "acquired" JC, everything changed, as the masses were coming in with an expectation of mean-spirited gossip. Despite my efforts, I could never meaningfully change that mindset.
I spent most of my 2 years running the site fending off competitors that would "let anything go" and were trying to "win" by maximizing the salaciousness of their content.
> One of the most effective forms of dissent I experienced while running CollegeACB were spoiler-filled-spam
That's a very interesting angle, but what you're saying is that the solution is to kill the service, and it's more effective to poison the stream that it is to try to dam it up.
To build off the metaphor: I think that constructing a "dam" is impossible. Even if it marginally affects the flow of the river, the spillover will affect many more communities that might have gone untouched otherwise.
I wonder what the effect would be of running a separate app that culled names from a school and having a drop down or something beside the name (and possibly statements) where others could log or checkmark statements such as "I didn't write this"; "I know this is not true"; "I support this person". For a high school age person a little support might mean a lot.
Thanks for taking the time to post. That spoiler hack is fun.
Does the situation change for Yik Yak when high schoolers use it? I saw somewhere that they geo-fence and are supposed to exclude people from posting at high schools, but that's apparently not working. It also seems relatively easy to get around.
I contemplated building HighSchoolACB.com, but held up because I was 1) unwilling to subject an even younger, cattier population to the service; and 2) unsure of the specific legal ramifications of building a service that was ostensibly "only for those above 18" and yet targeted at an audience that was clearly younger.
Yik Yak is heavily protected by the Communications Decency Act, and articles like this (generally) just serve to fuel the fire. After Time Magazine, Mike Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Ed, et. al. tried to draw negative attention to CollegeACB, it only served to strengthen our brand and broaden our footprint.
One needs to understand that sites / services like these aren't going anywhere. They'll continue to enjoy legal protection and benefit from the virality of anonymity and mean-spirited gossip.
One of the most effective forms of dissent I experienced while running CollegeACB were spoiler-filled-spam. If people started posting Game of Thrones spoilers and other such content, I'm sure it would affect usage. Creating petitions, contacting school officials, etc. were totally ineffective, and almost always just made the promise worse.
I'm not terribly proud of my ownership of that site, though I did try to run it with something of a conscience: never called for gossip, voluntarily removed 30,000+ posts, etc. Happy to answer any questions if people are interested about this space.